The Firefall Website announces plans for beta test weekends for this upcoming free online first-person shooter. Here are details on the beta weekends and their founder's program:

Firefallís upcoming Beta Weekends are scheduled Nov 30-Dec 2 and Dec 7-9. These are North American and European 48-hour stress-tests with players encouraged to find bugs, test various features and help the developers improve the beta by providing feedback. To sign up for Firefall and the upcoming Beta Weekends, please visit: http://www.firefallthegame.com/betaweekends/

Red 5ís Founders Rewards program unlocks exclusive bonuses for founding members as new funding goals are reached. With the first funding goal already achieved thanks to early supporters, all founding members have been given Virtual Camouflage Goggles. Upcoming items and live progress updates can be tracked at http://beta.firefallthegame.com/founders, and new players will still gain access to all unlocked rewards by purchasing a Founders Pack.

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I just got in last weekend, and I think it's really cool. The combat is tight and virtually lag-free, and the presentation of the sprawling open world environment is just jaw-dropping. You can see for MILES in the daytime and at night it gets dark enough that you'll need to use the flashlight, which completely flips it the other way. It will really stress your hardware if you want to max it out, and an SSD is all but required for the highest-res textures because of the amount of streaming going on.

There's not a whole lot of story content in right now, so if you're just running around solo I can see how you might get bored. PVE is a lot of random events, territory control against AI troops, and thumping, i.e. resource gathering, which is mostly all best done in groups. I've not tried out the PVP yet, but that is a huge part of this game and they're spending a lot of time tweaking and balancing the classes to make that work well.

I like how there's no leveling up, per se, you just earn XP and spend it on new tech. It takes a while to progress to the best stuff, and then you start crafting your own upgrade parts to squeeze every last drop of performance out of your suit. Another cool thing is that, if you want to play a different class, you just buy that suit. Experience doesn't carry over, though, you can only spend on upgrading each one what you've earned while wearing it. Making the switch to Tier 2 is kind of a pain right now, though... Usually you end up weaker than your supposedly inferior, but then fully-upgraded, previous equip.

As for the extended beta period, it's because they're actually in beta. It's not free promotion or a demo for early adopters, while they use the 'Beta' moniker to cover their ass against complaints. They're still very much in development, taking any and all feedback to heart. As recently as 6 months ago, they completely overhauled major systems of the game, including character progression (they used to have traditional leveling). In that sense, it's really not very fair to get yourself in there, spend half an hour not knowing what you're doing, and saying the final game will suck...